Can you actually swing from spider silk?
Spider silk is stronger than steel by weight and tougher than Kevlar due to its unique combination of rigid nanocrystals and stretchy amorphous regions. Scientists have successfully created transgenic silkworms that produce spider silk proteins, enabling the first-ever swing from artificial spider silk, though the material's thinness creates practical challenges.
Summary
The video explores the remarkable properties of spider silk and attempts to answer whether it's strong enough to swing from, as depicted in Spider-Man films. Spider silk consists of seven different types, with dragline silk (major ampullate silk) being the strongest. Testing shows dragline silk has an ultimate tensile strength of about 600 megapascals, which means a single square centimeter could support the weight of an African elephant. While this is weaker than ultra-high strength steel (3,000 megapascals), spider silk has superior specific strength—when comparing equal weights and lengths, spider silk can withstand twice the force of steel before breaking. The Darwin's bark spider produces the strongest known silk at 1,600 megapascals. Beyond strength, spider silk excels in toughness, a measure of energy absorption before breaking. It has a toughness of 205 megapascals per cubic meter, compared to 50 for Kevlar and 170 for steel. Darwin's bark spider silk reaches 520 megapascals per cubic meter. This exceptional toughness comes from its nanostructure: ordered protein regions (nanocrystals) provide rigidity while unordered amorphous regions allow stretching, creating a network that absorbs tremendous energy. Historically, humans have struggled to harvest natural spider silk due to spiders' cannibalistic nature and low yield (typically 100-300 yards per spider). Modern solutions involve genetic engineering. Scientists have successfully inserted spider silk genes into silkworms using transposon technology (piggyBac), enabling the silkworms to spin hybrid silk in their cocoons. Current transgenic silk achieves about 60% of pure spider silk's strength. Companies like Kraig BioCraft, AMSilk, and Spiber are now producing transgenic spider silk at scale—Kraig produced half a ton of cocoon last year. The video culminates with Derek successfully swinging from transgenic spider silk, though the extreme thinness of the material proved problematic, cutting his skin despite holding his full weight.
Key Insights
- Spider silk's greatest advantage over steel is specific strength—for the same mass and length, spider silk can withstand roughly twice the force of ultra-high strength steel before breaking, making it superior in weight-critical applications.
- Spider silk achieves exceptional toughness through its dual-phase nanostructure: rigid nanocrystals provide strength while amorphous regions allow stretching, together creating a material that absorbs three times more energy than the strongest steels and ten times more than Kevlar.
- Natural spider farming is commercially impractical because spiders are cannibals that require enormous amounts of space, yield only 100-300 yards of silk per spider, and have unpredictable individual personalities that affect cooperation.
- The critical barrier to producing artificial spider silk is replicating the spider's spinning duct process, which uses shear forces, pH changes, and precise mechanical drawing to align and cross-link proteins—a process that remains incompletely understood and difficult to reproduce in laboratories.
- Transgenic silkworms created using piggyBac transposon technology currently incorporate only 6-10% spider DNA but still achieve 60% of pure spider silk's mechanical performance, demonstrating that partial spider silk incorporation produces commercially viable results.
Topics
Transcript
[0:00] - This is the largest amount of spider silk that's ever been put together for a test like this. So I'm gonna put it to the ultimate test, and try to be the first person ever to swing from spider silk. I don't know if it's going to hold my weight, so let's see. In three, two, one. (Derek yelling) - In "Spider-Man Two," Peter Parker is on a runaway train full of passengers. And to stop it from derailing, he stands in front of the train, fires webs at the buildings around him, and holds on. The webs stretch, some of them snap, but they do just enough to slow down the train [0:31] and save everyone on…
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